Clint Boulton

Cribbing notes from Twitter’s playbook, Google+ has begun offering a suggested user list and it’s already causing quite a stir in social media circles. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google+, tipped his hand to the effort in a tweet on Twitter Sept. 2, noting: “We’re about to pilot a ‘suggested user’-like mechanism […]

With summer days dwindling, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has less than two weeks to make good on its pledge to launch its Google Wallet mobile payment service. Google Wallet is a mobile application service that will let owners of Sprint’s (NYSE:S) Samsung Nexus S 4G smartphones use their phone as a wallet at some 20 retailers and […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) fortified its commerce team by acquiring Zave Networks, a startup that built a point-of-sale platform for coupons and loyalty rewards, for an undisclosed sum. The search engine confirmed the news, first reported by TechCrunch, Sept. 2 for eWEEK: “We’re thrilled to welcome the Zave Networks team to Google. They have developed an impressive […]

Goodbye, Aardvark, Sidewiki and Fast Flip, we hardly used ye. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) continued its summer product discontinuation binge Sept. 2 with a fresh purging of the aforementioned products and other little-used Web services. “Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features,”wrote Alan […]

August sure was a quiet month for smartphones, particularly for those based on Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system. Beyond carrier preannouncements of forthcoming phones, a moratorium was practically put on the month, with Hurricane Irene perhaps the biggest event to mark (or mar, if you prefer) the mobile sector, with carrier outages up and down […]

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Chrome browser hit 15.5 percent market share through August, jumping more than a whole percentage point from the 14.3 percent the Web surfing software hit in July. Chrome just turned three years old Sept. 1 and it’s been a remarkable rise to this point, with the browser gaining share nearly every month for […]

Sony Tablets Unleashed In a sign of how fast the industry evolves, the Sony S Tablet will launch with Android 3.1, while the Tablet P will come with Android 3.2, which sports compatibility mode to make phone apps run more smoothly on the larger tablet screens. Sony Tablet S Design Sony’s Tablet S resembles a […]

You can add Google Offers, the fledgling daily deals service available in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Portland and New York City, to the short list. Google this past week began touting this Offer for the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan: Clicking through shows me this deal, worth 80 percent off: That’s some […]

Jobs on Android Unit Sales Here’s one good piece of FUD from Jobs: “Unfortunately, there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter. We hope that manufacturers will soon start reporting the number of Android handsets they ship each quarter. But today that just isn’t the case. Samsung released sales […]

Samsung Electronics continued its busy showing at IFA in Berlin Sept. 1, unveiling the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablet and Samsung Galaxy Note, a communications device with an emphasis on note-taking. Running Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) latest Android 3.2 “Honeycomb” operating system and powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core processor, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the first […]

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android U.S. smartphone market share of 40 percent is equivalent to the percentage of mobile consumers over 18 who use smartphones in this country, according to Nielsen’s July statistics. The researcher said Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS came in at No. 2 with 28 percent. Looking forward, one-third of U.S. consumers polled who said they […]

Google has taken its +1 button to the consumer masses, allowing users to install the +1 Chrome extension to begin +1ing favorite Web pages and sites right from their browser. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, posted a link to the +1 button extension from the Chrome Web Store on Google+ late last night: […]